Crypto Miners Flock to AI as Bitcoin Profits Plunge

On a 1000-acre plot in Abilene, Texas, eight H-shaped data centers are being built to house OpenAI's 'Gateway' project. The site is operated by Oracle and developed by Crusoe, a company founded by Chase Lochmiller, who previously worked at Polychain Capital as a partner. In 2018, Lochmiller and his friend Cully Cavness discovered that oil fields in the US were burning off massive amounts of flared gas every day. They moved their mining equipment to the wells, using the wasted gas to mine Bitcoin.

Crusoe's transition from crypto to AI appears significant, but its core capabilities haven't changed: finding power, building data centers, and operating them. Other companies like CoreWeave have also made a similar shift, leveraging their existing assets - electricity, land, and network permits acquired during the previous crypto cycle.

CoreWeave started as Atlantic Crypto in 2016, processing Ethereum on a table tennis table in Manhattan. They expanded to other cryptocurrencies and later shifted focus from mining to AI. Today, it's a top-tier AI cloud company supported by NVIDIA.

In 2026, several major crypto mining companies signed long-term contracts with big tech players: TeraWulf partnered with Anthropic for a 401 MW data center lease worth $190 billion; Cipher Mining and AWS signed a 300 MW contract valued at $55 billion. Core Scientific committed to providing massive capacity to CoreWeave.

According to CoinShares, over $70 billion in AI and high-performance computing contracts have been announced by publicly traded miners as of Q1 2026. Meanwhile, Bitcoin mining's unit profit has plummeted to around $30-$35 per PH/s.